wunderLOOP’s Real-Time Behavioural Advertising Implemented By Tiscali
In May, I wrote about a behavioural targeting panel session I attended at Internet World. This week Tiscali announced that they would be rolling out Wunderloop’s targetting solution to their ISP customers. This is an interesting development, because Tiscali are an ISP, with access to a broad range of behavioural data from their customers.
As I said in my original piece, one of the problems for most people implementing behavioural targeting is that they don’t have enough visibility of what their visitors are doing to create a useful profile of each person, because mostly they’re individual websites or portals, which only have a small share of each user’s attention. Tiscali don’t have this problem, because they’re an ISP, and can see everything their users do, within reason. But this creates another problem: privacy.
If Tiscali are going to use everything that a customer does online to create a profile and to serve more targeted advertising, how will their customers feel about that? Will Tiscali be able to get legal clearance to do this without a very intrusive opt-in statement? And will the default position be an opt-out or an opt-in?
You may want to consider that “they are rolling out to their isp customers” but in reality it will be to those who use their portal as I dont think Wunderloop can monitor the traffic and relate behaviour to this browsing as far as I am aware they can only do this from websites within their network.
So I think Tiscali is using this to prove 2 things, that BT advertising commands a higher price and that it can provide a more relevant experience for those visiting the Tiscali portal.
Unless they are doing deals with other publishers they can only make more money from their own portal ads or from supplying data from users browsing the Tiscali portal and then going somewhere else that is also in the WundrLoop network, which although it is a big network, it still limits the ability to get really granular and still retain the reach.
As I understand the deal, they’ll be using behavioural data collected through their role as an ISP (i.e. a lot of behavioural data) to serve BT ads on their own sites. Reach of the ads will therefore not be very high at the start.
In practise though, if they can convince advertisers that this is a valuable product, other publisher sites will have to serve Tiscali’s BT ads, because advertisers will buy their space to serve third part ads. They may also enter into partnerships with publishers who can get higher CPMs for BT space than for non-BT space.
But a lot, as you say, depends on a lot of unknowns!